April 2022

According to Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev, after the beginning of the “special operation in Ukraine,” the Americans moved their top-secret bioweapons to Mongolia:

Hoaxlines inquired about the claims about the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the relocation of laboratories. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency Public Affairs told Hoaxlines:

The Russian state has offered no evidence for its repeated assertions related to false claims it made about laboratories.  Given Russia’s history of making false claims about the United States and biological weapons–Russia spread bioweapon disinformation about the US for the first time no later than 1949–we’re not taking Russia’s word on this.

To provide just one example of the harm Russia has caused with similar narratives, in 1982 after a long-term Soviet disinformation campaign, Pakistan denied visa renewals to US scientists and ordered them to leave the country under threat of arrest. The scientists were there with the equivalent of over $9 billion in 2022 to research malaria control and prevent thousands of deaths in the region annually.

Why did Pakistan become so hostile toward the scientists, then? A Soviet disinformation campaign systematically spread rumors that the US was studying biological warfare for use in Cuba by experimenting on Pakistan’s people. The cost of this disinformation was every life we could have saved between 1982 and the early 2000s when Pakistan finally reduced malaria cases in the area.

The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications, which has published daily digests of Russia’s false claims, sees a more ominous meaning in the Kremlin’s game of musical bioweapons labs:

Claims that the US has moved laboratories from Ukraine to Mongolia are without evidence and the Agency “has no current, active, or planned engagements with Mongolia.”

Soviet bioweapon disinformation started no later than 1949, and it has been a lasting favorite, adapted to new outbreaks and crises. Here are some examples of bioweapon disinformation, foreign and domestic, from the past two decades.